Our organization changes don’t feel like the work of transforming a shoreline or beach, but maybe they should. Imagine if the transformation team members viewed themselves as stewards of the environment and not experts playing with boxes on an organization chart in pursuit of trivial outcomes. I suspect more of those initiatives would succeed.
Now is not the time for the dominant logic surrounding managing and leading to prevail. That’s how we got here, and “here” isn’t so great. It’s essential we find better ways to inspire, motivate, and engage great people who want to make a difference in our organizations. Here are twelve places to start:
While we live and work in interesting times where traditional elongated planning processes no longer fit, leaders still have the responsibility to define a coherent strategy. Choosing the right tools for strategy work in today’s environment is critical for a successful process.
There’s pressure for everything to move faster in our organizations at a time when it feels like we’re all trying to run through water or worse. Here are eight questions for you and your team to jump-start moving faster:
Having spent millions of dollars of my budget and many hundreds of hours of my time, and probably tens of thousands of hours of the combined time of my team members, I’ve cultivated some strong likes/dislikes and some powerful lessons learned. Use these in outstanding professional development health with your teams and colleagues.
What we want as leaders is deep immersion from our team members. Yet, our systems, numbers, and approaches mainly generate transactional involvement. They lack unity of purpose.
Are there leadership do-overs? The answer is a firm, “It depends.” In this article, I share the circumstances where it is appropriate to hit your Leadership Reset Button and I offer guidance for succeeding with this important work.
What if we led as if lives and livelihoods depended on the outcome? There are some great lessons from the vaccine moon-shot described by Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review. It’s time to put these lessons to work in all of our organizations.
The view on the role of Manager is a relic of yesterday’s thinking and practice in management. It’s an industrial revolution hangover that is ripe for retirement to a museum display. The label and old meaning don’t hunt in a digital world.
I regularly talk with managers and leaders who believe they are grinding harder but getting nowhere. One described himself as working in quicksand: “The more hours I spend and the harder I push, the faster we are sinking. I need to do something different.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt this way. Here are ideas to help you adjust your approaches and regain control:
